Page 398 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong
P. 398

     Top to bottom: Delivery plate for 66A4108 & 66A4109, one of the An- aconda Quads, still in the possession of Empire Cat in April 2018; Tony Scarsella, co-founder of Scarsella Bros, watches progress with Quad D9s; Scarsella’s first Quad D9 at SeaTac Airport in 1970
As a young engineer, Colf drew up schedules and kept track of production quantities, which gave him a good handle on just what the Quads could
do. “To get sixty loads an hour, you needed a thou- sand-foot-long borrow area. The Quad would push-load scrapers for one thousand feet in one direction and then turn around and load on the re- turn trip. It’s called chain-loading. As soon as you got one scraper loaded, another one would be right there in front of the Quad, ready to go because the push-Cat never waits. Everybody loved the Quads because they could turn around in twenty-eight feet7 at the end of a thousand-foot borrow area. They worked together practically like a team of horses.
“I remember another job where we got seventy loads an hour. We were working in eastern Oregon, cleaning up along the Columbia River with 631s. It was easy to push in the loose scrabble; we had operators who knew what they were doing, and they were loading in ten seconds. For three days, we got seventy loads an hour. We were amazed at how efficient and productive this operation was. I was always impressed by how well the Quads per- formed.”
FINAL JOB: FORT GREELY AIR BASE
The very last job Quad No.79 worked on was at Fort Greely, one hundred miles southeast of Fair- banks, Alaska (2002–07). “That was a huge proj- ect,” says Krieg, who by then was back working for Caterpillar in Arizona. “Fort Greely sat inac- tive for years, and then they decided it would be the perfect place to launch interceptor missiles at anything coming out of North Korea. But before they could do that, they had to completely rebuild the runways because they were in such bad shape. The Quad went up there to push load scrapers that were digging out several of the old aircraft aprons and importing all new gravel. Then the C17s could land with their payload of interceptor missiles. They’d pull a missile out of the back of the jet, take
7 “The entire assembly turns somewhat like an articulated rubber-tired unit. A 70-degree angle can be achieved, producing a turning radius of 28 ft. 3 in.” – Taken from “Two Tractor Combination by Caterpillar”, Western Construction, March 1965, p44.
396 | PETERSON: 85 YEARS AND GOING STRONG
 


























































































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